by Chloe Gong
Benedikt jerked away. He tore the tarp off them, getting to his feet in a whirlwind of motion.
“I need to tell Roma what we just saw,” he snapped. “I’ll see you at home.”
He hurried off before Marshall could follow.
* * *
Roma finally sent his letter of reply five hours after he started writing it. Once he had proofread it a tenth time, he wasn’t entirely sure anymore whether he had spelled his own name correctly.
“Should I have included my patronymic?” he muttered to himself now, flipping to the next page of his book without taking in any of the words. “Is that strange?”
The whole thing was too strange. Four years ago, he had sent Juliette so many love letters that when he sat down to write this letter—to agree that they should gather as much information as possible from their separate sources on Walter Dexter, before meeting in Great World tomorrow—his immediate reaction upon scribing “Dear Juliette” was to make a comparison of her hair to a raven.
Roma sighed, then put the book down on his chest, closing his eyes. He was already lying on his bed. He figured he may as well take a nap until it was time for him to go sticking his nose into the White Flower factories. Someone there had to have information on Walter Dexter’s ongoings.
But the moment he started dozing, there was a heavy thudding on his bedroom door.
Roma groaned. “What is it?”
His door opened. Benedikt came barreling in. “Do you have a moment?”
“You’re interrupting my quality time with Eugene Onegin, but that’s quite all right.” Roma removed his book from his chest and set it down on his blanket. “He’s unnecessarily pretentious anyway.”
“The monster. The insects. They’re one and the same.”
Roma bolted up. He demanded, “Say again?”
Benedikt took a seat at his cousin’s desk, his anxiety releasing through the rapid tapping of his fingers. Roma, on the other hand, had scrambled up and started to pace the entirety of his bedroom. There was too much tension building up between his bones.
“The insects come from the monster,” Benedikt said in a rush. “We saw it. We saw it leap in the water and then…” He mimed an explosion outward. “The nonsense all makes sense now. Those who say that sightings of the monster create the madness are correct, just not in the way they think. The monster makes the insects. The insects make the madness.”
Roma was suddenly very short of breath. Not in panic, but in understanding. As if he had been presented with a gift box of information, disassembled in little pieces, and if he didn’t put it together quickly enough, the gift would be taken away.
“This is colossal,” Roma said, forcing himself to go slowly. “If we trust Lourens when he says these insects operate identically to one another, if we assume they are all being controlled by one entity, and that one entity is in fact the monster…” Roma stopped pacing. He almost dropped to his knees. The monster was real. Real. And it wasn’t that he hadn’t believed the sightings prior to this moment, but he’d accepted them the way he accepted the foreigners in the concessions—as something of an inconvenience but not his biggest threat. The sightings were outside his field of concern, secondary to the madness. But now…
“If we kill the monster, we kill each and every one of these peculiar insects in Shanghai. If we kill the monster, we stop the madness.”
Then the insects embedded in Alisa would die. Then she would no longer be under the clutches of the madness. Then she could wake up again. It was as good as a cure.
Benedikt thinned his lips. “You say that as if it will be easy. You didn’t see it.”
Roma paused in his pacing. “Well—what did you see?”
A loaded quiet set into the room. Benedikt seemed to consider his answer. He tapped his knuckles against the desk a few times, then did it again for good measure. Finally, he gave his head a minuscule shake.
“You’ve heard the stories,” Benedikt replied tightly. “They’re not so far off from the truth. I wouldn’t worry about its appearance yet. Before we can even consider killing it, how do we find it again?”
Roma resumed his pacing. “Marshall said the Communists saw it coming from Zhang Gutai’s apartment.”
If Roma had been paying close enough attention, he would have seen his cousin’s expression suddenly crumple—not in a grimace or a sneer but rather a flash of pain. It was fortunate that all Montagovs knew how to switch to a blank stare in the blink of an eye. By the time Roma glanced over, Benedikt had resumed a neutral expression, waiting for his cousin to continue.
“I need you and Marshall to stake out Zhang Gutai’s apartment,” Roma decided. The plan was coming together while he talked, each piece slotting in mere moments after the one before had clicked. “Watch for any appearance of chudovishche. Confirm for me that Zhang Gutai is guilty. If you see the monster appear with your own two eyes, then we know he is controlling it to spread madness across Shanghai. Then we know how to find the monster to kill it: by finding Zhang Gutai.”
This time Benedikt did grimace plainly. “You wish for me simply to watch? That sounds… tedious.”
“I would worry for your safety if it were exciting work. The more boring, the better off you are.”
Benedikt shook his head. “You bored us enough searching for a live victim of the madness, and look where that got us,” he said. “Why can’t you and Juliette do it? You’re already on the investigation. I have my own life to tend to too, you know.”
Roma narrowed his eyes. Benedikt crossed his arms. Is there something about this assignment that is too much of an ask? Roma wondered. What is his resistance to it? It is merely another chance to goof off with Marshall, which he does on a daily basis anyway.
“I won’t waste our collaboration with Juliette on stalking Zhang Gutai,” Roma answered, sounding offended at the notion.
“I thought this monster was our concern, not the Larkspur.”
“I know that,” Roma shot back. He was bristling, unable to hold the sharpness from his tone. Alisa’s life was a stake—he did not have the energy to debate such petty matters. “But we cannot be certain Zhang Gutai is truly linked to the monster until we see something. Until then we need an alternate plan for answers on the monster and its madness. Until then we need to get to the bottom of this Larkspur figure so we can gather why he knows what he knows and use it to get back to the monster.”
But Benedikt was still insistent on digging his foot in. “You cannot stalk Zhang Gutai after you find the Larkspur? Obviously he is linked with him in some fashion if you found correspondences between them.”
“Benedikt,” Roma said firmly. “It was only one correspondence from the Larkspur’s end.” He shook his head. His cousin was sidetracking him. “Look—you and Marshall have to do it because we don’t know how long it could take for the monster to make an appearance.”
“Can’t you just tell a lower-ranked gangster to keep an eye on him?”
“Benedikt.”
“And truly, you only need one person on this task—”
“Are you,” Roma interrupted, his tone suddenly cold, “a White Flower or not?”
That shut him up. Benedikt clamped his lips together, then said, “Of course.”
“So stop arguing against my command.” Roma placed his hands behind his back. “Is that all?”
Benedikt stood. He made a mock bow, his mouth twisted sourly. “Yes, Cousin,” he said. “I’ll leave you to your heir duties now. Make sure not to overly exert yourself.” A gust of wind followed his fast escape. The slam of the door echoed loudly enough to shake the house.
Heir duties. What a jokester. Benedikt knew full and well that Roma could either be the heir or be a ghost. Benedikt might have been one of the only people who actually understood that Roma did not fight so hard to remain heir because he enjoyed the power but because it was the only place he could control his personal safety. If the heavens opened and offered Roma a little villa in the outskirts of the country, where he
could move himself and his loved ones out to live a life in obscurity, he would choose it immediately.
Benedikt’s dig rolled right off Roma’s shoulders. His cousin could complain all he liked and take his anger out on Roma, but he was too logical to dismiss the task outright. He would do it and complain like hell about it, then shut up when it mattered. Besides, Benedikt could not grumble for long. Whatever had knotted his intestines in such a state was bound to loosen soon, and then he would forget why he threw such a fit.
Roma sighed and flopped back onto his bed.
He had always known that sitting at the top came with its prickles and thorns.
But in this city, void of any alternative path, at least this was better than not being heir at all.
* * *
Later that night, a knock came down on Kathleen’s door, startling her from her reading. She was snuggled into her blankets already, half considering feigning sleep so she would not need to get up, put her pendant on, and answer the door, when the door simply opened on its own.
“Thank you for waiting on my response,” she droned, eyeing Rosalind as she came in.
“You weren’t going to open it,” her sister replied knowingly.
Kathleen grimaced, closing the magazine she was reading. She supposed this season’s latest shoe designs could wait. “I might have been asleep.”
Rosalind looked up. She pointed at the small chandelier, then at the three golden lamps scattered around the room. “You sleep with the lights on?”
“Pft. Maybe.”
With a roll of her eyes, Rosalind sat down at the foot of the bed. She seemed to gaze at nothing for a long while, before drawing her legs up to her chest and resting her face delicately on the flat surface of her knees.
Kathleen frowned. “Ça va?”
“Ça va.” Rosalind sighed. “Lord Cai scared me tonight.”
“Me too.” It was a mighty big claim to insist a spy had made its way into the Scarlet inner circle. The circle was only so big. “We have enough trouble with people dying. This is going to divide even further.”
Rosalind made a noise—it could have been one of agreement; it could have been nothing but a need to clear her throat. Another few seconds passed by. Then she asked:
“You don’t think it’s Juliette, do you?”
Kathleen’s eyes widened. “No!” she exclaimed. “Why would you even think that?”
Rosalind thinned her lips. “I’m just thinking out loud. You’ve heard the same rumors as I have.”
“Juliette would never.”
The air was getting a little thick. Kathleen hadn’t expected this, hadn’t expected a wary silence to follow when she wanted agreement instead.
“You can’t be too trusting all the time.”
“I’m not too trusting,” Kathleen snapped, prickled now.
“Oh, really?” Rosalind shot back. The volume of their voices was growing. “What is this quick need for defense, then? I was just throwing the possibility out there and you’re acting like I’m biting your head off—”
“Talk is dangerous,” Kathleen cut in. “You know this. You know what a few thoughtless words can do—”
“Who cares what talk can do! She’s Juliette!”
Kathleen jerked against her nest of blankets, shocked. Her ears were ringing, like her sister’s outburst had been an explosion rather than an exclamation. Though they were both close to Juliette, Rosalind’s relationship to their cousin was different from hers. Rosalind and Juliette were too similar. They both coveted the leading role, the right to have the ultimate decision. When they clashed, only one could be right.
But… this wasn’t a clash. This was just…
“God, I’m sorry,” Rosalind said suddenly, her voice softening. “I don’t—I’m sorry. I love Juliette. You know I do. I’m just… I’m scared, okay? And we don’t have the same safety she does. Lord Cai is going to stop at nothing to find out who’s acting the traitor, and you know he’ll suspect outsiders like us first.”
Kathleen stiffened. “We are hardly outsiders.”
“But we are not Cais, at the end of the day.”
Much as Kathleen hated it, her sister was right. It mattered little that they were more closely related to the beating core of the Cais than the other second, third, fourth cousins. So long as their last name was different, there would always be that doubt in the family over whether Rosalind and Kathleen truly belonged here. They came from Lady Cai’s side—the side that had been brought into this house rather than the side that had been raised in it for generations.
“I guess we need to be careful, then,” Kathleen mumbled. “Make sure we have no reason to be accused.”
People like Tyler would not have to worry. Even if they were all just as related, he bore the Cai name. Anything he did, anything he achieved was something wonderful reflecting back on the family, on the generations of ancestors who had built them from the ground up. Anything Kathleen and Rosalind were a part of reflected back to the Langs instead, and Kathleen knew absolutely nothing about that side of her family history, short of the grandmother she visited once a year.
“Yeah,” Rosalind whispered. She sighed, scrubbing her forehead. “Okay, I should go. I’m sorry for yelling.” She hopped off the bed. “Get some sleep. Bonne nuit.”
“Good night,” Kathleen echoed. The door had already closed. When she lay back down and picked up her magazine again, she could no longer return her attention to the shoes.
You’ve heard the same rumors as I have.
“Wait,” Kathleen whispered aloud. “What rumors?”
Twenty-Seven
Juliette was a hairsbreadth away from snapping.
The air was crisp that afternoon, a product of clear skies and the sea breeze. As she strolled along the pavement under the delicate shade of the waving green trees, she was surrounded by the sounds of rushing fountain water and chirping birdsong—the sounds of the International Settlement when it was still a little dazed from its previous wild night, only awakening with the golden sunbeams caressing its edges.
It should have been peaceful, calm. Too bad she was strolling with Paul Dexter, who hadn’t yet given her any substantive information to work with, despite the hours they had spent together already.
“I have a surprise for you,” Paul was saying now, giddy with his enthusiasm. “I was so delighted to receive your letter, Miss Cai. I’m thoroughly enjoying our time in each other’s company.”
That makes one of us.
It was almost as if he knew what game she was playing at. Every time she mentioned his father’s job, he diverted it to talk about how hardworking Walter Dexter was. Every time she mentioned his work with the Larkspur, Paul steered into Shanghai’s climate and how terribly difficult it was to find reputable work. Briefly, she wondered if Paul had perhaps heard about Juliette rushing into one of the vaccination houses and now suspected her of trying to take down the Larkspur, but it seemed improbable that the information would pass to someone as irrelevant as Paul Dexter. She also wondered if he had received the same instruction from the Larkspur as those other merchants—on killing Juliette for a price—but she couldn’t imagine how he was planning to play his hand if that were the case. It was more likely that he was sitting on everything he had, simply so he could keep her around for longer.
“A surprise?” Juliette echoed absently. “You shouldn’t have.”
He had to know that she was digging around for something. That fact alone gave him the upper hand—gave him the right to tug Juliette around as he pleased. But there was no chance he knew specifically what she was looking for, and Juliette held that close to her chest. There was no chance he realized she knew about his father’s role as the Larkspur’s supplier and that she was after every little thread of information the Dexters had on the Larkspur’s identity.
Somebody who was supplying the Larkspur with the very drug he needed for his vaccines had to have an address to work with. It was absurd to think otherwise. How el
se would Walter Dexter make deliveries? By leaving drugs in a designated hole within a brick wall?
“Oh, but I did.” Paul spun suddenly. Rather than walking at her side, he was now two paces ahead of her, strolling backward with his hand outstretched so he could look at her. Juliette forced herself to take his hand. “You will love it. It’s at my house.”
Juliette perked up. It was most improper for Paul Dexter to be showing her something at his house, but it was a brilliant opportunity to maximize her snooping. Let him dare try something unsavory. He would find himself most incapacitated.
“How exciting,” Juliette said.
Paul must have sensed her lift in mood, because he beamed at her. In fact, he did not stop beaming as they continued walking; nor did he stop jabbering, going on and on about his thoughts on the city, the nightlife, the casinos—
“Have you heard about the strikes?”
Juliette’s heel came down hard on a crack in the sidewalk. Paul reached out fast, grabbing her elbow so she did not fall, but Juliette did not think to thank him as she glanced up to his kindly expression. She only blinked, a small, disbelieving laugh escaping.
“What do you know about the strikes?” she asked.
“Plenty, Miss Cai,” Paul replied confidently. “There are two types of Communists now: those who are dying because they are too poor to deserve the Larkspur’s cure and those who are angry enough from this fact that they wish to rise up.”
Too poor to deserve… What kind of tomfoolery—
“Those strikes are happening in the Scarlet-funded factories,” Juliette said. Her voice came out too tightly, and she coughed, trying to lighten her tone so Paul would not think her acting aggressive. “It will be fine. We have it under control.”
“Certainly,” Paul agreed, but he sounded like he was merely humoring her, which was an insult in itself. “Ah, here we are.”
As Paul stopped outside a tall gate, pressing a button to alert somebody within the house to manage the lock, Juliette squinted through the bars. The house was tucked inward enough that she saw nothing save hills and hills of green grass lawns.
